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Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

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Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#51

Post by ovi256 »

davidw wrote: post #5
alec wrote: post #3

"A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now." That's kind of scary.

Is it real? I am no fan of Apple or Jobs, but it almost sounds too evil . Edit: in reply to a "tweet" of mine, he posted the headers: http://hugoroy.eu/jobs-os.php It's really hard to believe they'd be such arrogant jerks as to go after something open source like that.

Do you have any proof that the "arrogant jerks" at Apple go after Theora themselves ? Steve Jobs did not state it anywhere. Way to get worked up over the wrong guys.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#52

Post by vetinari »

kierank wrote: post #39
riferguson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand corrected. Apple has one patent in the H.264 pool, US 7292636, and one in the MPEG-4 Systems pool, US 6134243. I have no idea if either of these would be relevant to Theora. For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.

MPEG-4 Systems is not offered any more (since it's effectively dead).

"Systems" is mp4 container.

Did you mean MPEG-4 Part 2 (Advanced Simple Profile)?

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#53

Post by KevinBongart »

I don't get it.

In his open letter, Jobs explains why he chose HTML5 and H.264 instead of Flash, and the author here doesn't not answer about Flash but H.264.

Even though Theora looks more open than H.264 for video, I think HTML5/H.264 still stands more open than Flash for the entire web.

So, yes, Theora sounds cool, but that's not Jobs point. The point is, get rid of Flash.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#54

Post by eru »

scott_s wrote: post #49
tsuraan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webkit is open-source because the people who wrote it (KDE devs) put it under the LGPL. Apple was playing catch-up, and used the best code base they could to get started. They aren't philanthropists, they are just (grudgingly) abiding by the license of the software they are building on.

That's true of all companies that contribute to open source.

How do you come to that conclusion?

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#55

Post by Quarrelsome »

btilly wrote: post #29

Hopefully Bilski renders these patent issues moot. I really, really hope that. And if it does, I expect multi-media to improve quite a bit in the next 2 years.

If you don't know what "Bilski" is (like me). I founds us a link:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski_overview

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#56

Post by jcl »

samps wrote: post #45
riferguson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand corrected. Apple has one patent in the H.264 pool, US 7292636, and one in the MPEG-4 Systems pool, US 6134243. I have no idea if either of these would be relevant to Theora. For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.

> For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool. Furthermore, it's not clear what Apple would stand to gain by enforcing its two patents that may or may not be relevant to Theora. Maybe I'm wrong, but media patent enforcement doesn't seem to be one of Apple's core businesses (HTC lawsuit notwithstanding). There are plenty of other companies, though, that likely have a vested interest in…

Apple stands to gain more than just licensing fees by threatening any non-H.264 codec. As Steve Jobs points out in his "Thoughts on Flash", Apple has millions of devices in the wild whose hardware is optimized exclusively for H.264. If any other video format gains dominance, the devices will not work nearly as well (cutting the battery life by half just to play an older codec, in his example).

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#57

Post by vetinari »

kierank wrote: post #27
vetinari wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is ( http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ ). It is even available gratis (H.264 specification is not).

H.264 specification is available gratis: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-200903-S/en

I stand corrected, thanks.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#58

Post by aphyr »

futuremint wrote: post #11
jamesbressi wrote: post #9

Steve has been quite busy with his email lately. I don't remember him ever doing this much correspondence via email. Very interesting.

I had the same thought. I think its because he wants to get "Sent from my iPad" on the internet on as many web pages and into as many minds as possible. Its a marketing ploy.

Ah, that's why they're so short!

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#59

Post by dhimes »

tlb wrote: post #40

h.264 is far, far more open than Flash. What matters is that the spec is public and that you can choose from many implementations. There are no usable competing implementations of Flash, but dozens for h.264 including excellent open-source ones. The h.264 terms aren't onerous. If you ship less than 100,000 devices you pay nothing. At large scale, it's $0.10 / unit. When selling hardware, that's a pretty light tax. As…

Here's a summary of the license terms:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsS...

Let's say you make videos and sell access to them on your web site on a title-by-title basis :) Videos 12 min, USD $0.02 per title or 2% of access price, whichever is less.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#60

Post by kgrad »

Could someone please explain to me how Flash isn't open? To my knowledge, everything about flash is open other than Adobe's IDE. The spec has been released, the sdk is OSS and anyone is free to compile to SWF... Am I mistaken here?
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